Looks like Intel has major temperature issues with I9's

Ozmodan

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/20/intel_core_i9_performance_in_dell_apple_laptops/

Good thing I ignored the computer store salesman trying to convince me to buy that I9 laptop, I got a AMD based on instead.

Quizzical

Who would have guessed that a 6-core CPU can crank out more heat than a 4-core CPU?  Apparently not Apple or Dell.  It's probably not Intel's fault if laptop vendors build laptops with insufficient cooling, as most laptop vendors are known for doing creatively stupid things.  In the past, Clevo has stuck 130 W processors in laptops, but given them plenty of cooling.

gervaise1

No surprise that Dell and Apple didn't comment. The article even quotes what happens with Intel's Thermal Velocity Boost feature: it throttles back if the temperature gets to high ..... so it doesn't burst into flame! 

A vendor could just as easily do this with an AMD cpu - why AMD won't be taking any potshots at Intel over this. This is a vendor issue.

Tiller

Dell is notorious for creating laptops with insufficient cooling for both GPU and GPU. I have an old one with an i7 in it that you pretty much have to keep on a fan cooled laptop mat or overheats and shuts down. Been like that since I bought the thing. The whole outside of the laptop heats up and I already had one keyboard die in it because of heat damage. The air output you could literally roast a pig or light a cigarette.

Ridelynn

As much as I would like to bash Intel here -- not really Intel's fault. Same thing would happen if you tried to stick a Threadripper into a laptop.

Kyleran

As long as the Intel chip runs as advertised at various temperature levels I see no issue on their side.

I own a Sager (Clevo) gaming laptop (and previously an Acer) that has never had cooling problems, but a Dell and Gateway that did.

It's a problem created by the assembler, not the processor.

NetSage

It's not intels fault.  Obviously packing more power in a small space is going to create more heat.  It's kind of why AMD has started winning.  They stopped trying to put more in a smaller space and just adapted.

frostymug

I only have an i7 in mine, but the one thing I did that really helped with temps was to build a good desktop and put the laptop in the corner

FlyinDutchman87

One reason I don't game on my laptops.... All that heat packed so close together to all the important bits. It's basically a concept specifically made to degrade the system around it. I've only ever seen one laptop that lasted more than 3 years without something important breaking and needing a part replaced.

my laptop is a POS i3 i bought used for 150$.  I use it for writing cheesy litRPG novels and browsing the net. All gaming is done on my crappy phone or my desktop rig. 

Cleffy

I don't understand why they don't use liquid cooling in laptops. Seems like a good application if you can find where to put the radiator that can dissipate 200watts of energy. Like on a 17" laptop just have an area that's all radiator and fan with an exposure on the top and bottom for optimal flow.

NetSage

Cleffy said:

I don't understand why they don't use liquid cooling in laptops. Seems like a good application if you can find where to put the radiator that can dissipate 200watts of energy. Like on a 17" laptop just have an area that's all radiator and fan with an exposure on the top and bottom for optimal flow.

You still have it dissipate the heat.  All liquid cooling does is move it faster and offer a much greater heatsink in exchange for not having to be right on top of the heat source.  It's not like a freezer where it's generating cool air.

An option may be a quick connect kind of cooling system with a dock(like the ones with fans but with some sort of better cooling) for intensive work.  However that becomes and issue of keeping contaminants and the like out of the system.

Ridelynn

There was an Asus that had a docking station that plugged into a liquid circuit on the laptop a few years ago. 

It was huge.

Wizardry

I must have been in dumbass mode because one day with some extra spending money ,i decided i would buy a good laptop.I did own one for a long time but always felt like i wasted my money.
So i bought this really good laptop and had some really annoying issues and i hardly ever use the laptop.
Then i take the laptop in to get diagnosed and the clerk is like asking me for the AC adaptor and i am like,dude i have NEVER used it on batteries,they should be running like brand new so it is not an issue with the power.

Bottom line is that laptops are over priced and aside from the small versatility of being able to run on batteries,it is imo a waste of money.If you need it for your business and yes some really must have a laptop,i have seen the many uses in the field,but NO you do not need it to play games on the bus ride to school or to play games on the airplane flight.

Daranar

Wizardry said:

I must have been in dumbass mode because one day with some extra spending money ,i decided i would buy a good laptop.I did own one for a long time but always felt like i wasted my money.
So i bought this really good laptop and had some really annoying issues and i hardly ever use the laptop.
Then i take the laptop in to get diagnosed and the clerk is like asking me for the AC adaptor and i am like,dude i have NEVER used it on batteries,they should be running like brand new so it is not an issue with the power.

Bottom line is that laptops are over priced and aside from the small versatility of being able to run on batteries,it is imo a waste of money.If you need it for your business and yes some really must have a laptop,i have seen the many uses in the field,but NO you do not need it to play games on the bus ride to school or to play games on the airplane flight.

Laptops are way over priced and a generally a waste.   Though i'm typing this from my brand new laptop.   This is the first time I've had a laptop in almost a decade.  I needed one for my business I have to be able to pull stuff up and get info and design adjustments in clients faces during meetings.  But I'm sitting here thinking how much performance I could have gotten out of my desktop for the price I put in this mediocre laptop that I will likely use once or twice a week and on vacations...

Buying a laptop for games is a gigantic waste of money.  If you want an i9, put it in a tower with liquid cooling and you are good to go.  Why anyone needs an i9 in a laptop is beyond me and just wasteful.  I have an gen7 i7 and GTX1050.  It's enough to run Photoshop and light video editing in front of clients to make minor tweaks in meetings before I bring everything back to my workstation at home and grind out the final projects before loading up a game

Just about the only gaming that will happen on this is on vacation after the wife and kid go to bed and by my wife sitting on the couch playing cities:skylines lol.

Quizzical

Buying a laptop and using it like a desktop is doing it wrong, as others have said.  Laptops do serve a legitimate use when you need something portable, but a cheap $500 laptop can fill that niche just fine.  And cheap laptops are fine for gaming if by "gaming" you mean Solitaire, FreeCell, and Minesweeper.

Gaming laptops are more problematic, and most of the people who want one shouldn't.  Still, they're good for business travelers who spend a lot of time in hotels and want to play games there when they're not working, or anyone else who wants to play games but has to move the computer around a lot.

Good gaming laptops will be plenty thick and heavy enough to provide ample cooling.  If engineered properly, a laptop that weighs nine pounds and is 1.5" thick can cool some solid gaming hardware, at least if you keep the dust out.  That kind of heft isn't what you want to carry around in a backpack or briefcase all day, but it's fine for something that you only have to move when you travel.  Any device that tries to advertise itself both as being relatively thin and as a gaming laptop should be avoided, however.

postlarval

Quizzical said:

Who would have guessed that a 6-core CPU can crank out more heat than a 4-core CPU?  

That is true only if the software is designed to use all cores available. If it's designed to use a set number of cores, then it's mostly the same.
 
I have an 18-core Xenon in my iMac Pro, and it barely gets warm, even when I'm rendering video. Indeed not as warm as my old iMac with an i7.

Of course, the key lies in the number of cores used by the software. I use FinalCut Pro, and Apple designed their software to take advantage of all the cores in each product in their product line. FinalCut runs circles around Adobe Premiere Pro on my machine, and Premiere's performance drops off dramatically when trying to use more than four cores, unlike FinalCut Pro.

More cores use less power and therefore generate less heat because each core doesn't have to do the same amount of work as each core in a CPU with fewer cores. It doesn't matter how many you have, but how many you use.

I don't know how many cores most games are designed to use, but I suspect it's not many.

Quizzical

postlarval said:

More cores use less power and therefore generate less heat because each core doesn't have to do the same amount of work as each core in a CPU with fewer cores. It doesn't matter how many you have, but how many you use.

That's true if everything is the same architecture and you're getting the same net performance from more cores clocked lower.  The Core i9-8950K doesn't necessarily want to clock them lower, however:

https://ark.intel.com/products/134903/Intel-Core-i9-8950HK-Processor-12M-Cache-up-to-4_80-GHz

Max turbo of 4.8 GHz.  And in order to stop the extra cores from using more power, they need to be power gated off, not just intermittently idle.  Power gating will automatically happen if they're idle for long enough, but depending on the workload, that doesn't always happen.

For what it's worth, it's basically a different bin of a Core i7-8700K with a lower base clock speed.  It has nothing to do with the HEDT Core i9 parts as part of Sky Lake-X.

Kyleran

Been using gaming laptops for over 10 years, great for sitting in my recliner to play my favorite game while my wife sits nearby watching TV, likely would have ended up divorced otherwise.

For those times voice chat is absolutely necessary,  I just pick up and relocate to another room and leave her to watch her programs.

Of course, it comes with me on vacation, for late evening gaming sessions after wife collapses in exhaustion from trapsing us around everywhere.  (Our vacations are never restful,  non stop activity for her)

So for me, gaming laptops have been great, just wish Razor would have followed through on their multi monitor design.

BTW, laptop is a bit of a misnomer,  while I do keep it on a cutting board on my lap (to prevent burns) its more of a portable desktop, easily weighing in over 10 pounds. 

postlarval

Quizzical said:

postlarval said:

More cores use less power and therefore generate less heat because each core doesn't have to do the same amount of work as each core in a CPU with fewer cores. It doesn't matter how many you have, but how many you use.

That's true if everything is the same architecture and you're getting the same net performance from more cores clocked lower.  The Core i9-8950K doesn't necessarily want to clock them lower, however:

https://ark.intel.com/products/134903/Intel-Core-i9-8950HK-Processor-12M-Cache-up-to-4_80-GHz

Max turbo of 4.8 GHz.  And in order to stop the extra cores from using more power, they need to be power gated off, not just intermittently idle.  Power gating will automatically happen if they're idle for long enough, but depending on the workload, that doesn't always happen.

For what it's worth, it's basically a different bin of a Core i7-8700K with a lower base clock speed.  It has nothing to do with the HEDT Core i9 parts as part of Sky Lake-X.

Thanks for the added info and adding that link. I can't believe what low specs that thing has.

Quizzical

Something like this probably wouldn't have the problems with excessive throttling of a Core i9 laptop processor:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16834234978

It's also two inches thick and weighs over ten pounds, which allows for plenty of cooling.

Quizzical

Actually a "laptop" Core i9 processor is so close to just sticking a desktop CPU into a laptop that some vendors decide to just use an actual desktop CPU:

https://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np9175-clevo-p775tm-g.html

Or the Ryzen option on:

https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/predator-series/predatorhelios500

Quizzical

postlarval said:

Quizzical said:

postlarval said:

More cores use less power and therefore generate less heat because each core doesn't have to do the same amount of work as each core in a CPU with fewer cores. It doesn't matter how many you have, but how many you use.

That's true if everything is the same architecture and you're getting the same net performance from more cores clocked lower.  The Core i9-8950K doesn't necessarily want to clock them lower, however:

https://ark.intel.com/products/134903/Intel-Core-i9-8950HK-Processor-12M-Cache-up-to-4_80-GHz

Max turbo of 4.8 GHz.  And in order to stop the extra cores from using more power, they need to be power gated off, not just intermittently idle.  Power gating will automatically happen if they're idle for long enough, but depending on the workload, that doesn't always happen.

For what it's worth, it's basically a different bin of a Core i7-8700K with a lower base clock speed.  It has nothing to do with the HEDT Core i9 parts as part of Sky Lake-X.

Thanks for the added info and adding that link. I can't believe what low specs that thing has.

If you take a 65 W chip and decide to cap it at 45 W, clock speeds go down.

postlarval

Quizzical said:

Buying a laptop and using it like a desktop is doing it wrong, as others have said.  Laptops do serve a legitimate use when you need something portable, but a cheap $500 laptop can fill that niche just fine.  And cheap laptops are fine for gaming if by "gaming" you mean Solitaire, FreeCell, and Minesweeper.

I agree. I do need mobility as well, but I decided to go with a tablet instead of a laptop. Most tablets today do the job just fine and are a lot cheaper than a laptop.

Desktop-tablet-phone, the perfect combination for me.

Ridelynn

I have at work a desktop running Win10, a MBP on OS X, and my iPhone.

I do 90% of my work on my phone - calls and email.

I do 9% of my work on the MBP - longer emails, Excel, Word, Unix terminal, some SQL, Very occasionally Powerpoint. This is mostly because OS X has some really nice built-in PDF tools that I'm pretty used to. For 95% of what I do with this machine, a Desktop would suffice, but I do end up taking it on business trips, and it's nice to be able to carry into the conference room to have for long meetings.

I do maybe 1% of my work on the PC. When I need MS Project or some other Windows-specific program, that's about it.

There are entire days that go by where I don't even touch the laptop, and the desktop could go for many days in a row without getting touched. But my phone - it's a glorious and happy day when I can get away from that damn phone for more than 15 minutes at a time.

Just musing on how my computer use has evolved. Apart from gaming and video encoding (which I don't do at work), a faster CPU doesn't really benefit me at all. I have some SQL queries that take a long time, and we do have some simulation software that can grind for a bit (being that it's single threaded, I don't wonder why) but those run on a server, not on any of my machines. 

Even at home, I have a nice gaming rig. I also have a PS4. Right now, my entertainment time is split pretty evenly between the two of them. I tend to get absorbed into a game for a few weeks at a time, and my time is skewing more towards console lately - largely because I'm getting old and the KB/M gets painful to use after a few hours at a stretch.

Quizzical

Ridelynn said:

I'm getting old and the KB/M gets painful to use after a few hours at a stretch.

My solution to that is to play most PC games with a gamepad.  For some games, it means that I just can't play the game at all.  But many games work fine by using the gamepad software to map gamepad buttons to keyboards keys.

Vrika

Part of Apple's issues were caused by a bug that caused excessive throttling. Apple has now released a bugfix, and the laptop works better:
   https://www.macrumors.com/2018/07/24/throttling-fix-2018-macbook-pro-improvements/